


She Observes

by OxfordOctopus



Series: Snakeflower [1]
Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Alternate Universe - Always a Different Sex, Ask Difficult Questions Get Difficult Answers, Basilisks, Female Harry Potter, Gen, Implied/Referenced Child Abuse, Parselmouth Harry Potter, Parseltongue, i chose it because of what the flowers are, i didn't choose orchid because i'm a victorian lover, i mean it's difficult to put into big ol words but, she's kinda got this basilisk thing going on for herself and her little bab, snake-like harry? kinda?, watch out for her name too btw
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-07-01
Updated: 2019-07-10
Packaged: 2020-06-02 08:35:07
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 3,137
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19437799
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/OxfordOctopus/pseuds/OxfordOctopus
Summary: There is something wrong with Orchid Potter. Her Aunt and Uncle knows it, her cousin knows it, even she, personally, knows it. Behind seaglass green-yellow eyes, there is something broken, shattered like ceramic and left untidy in a heap, a pile of not anything at all, thank you very much, stares out from inside. Somewhere, in the gaps between all that nothing, all jagged edges and empty stares, is a girl, but if she were to be honest with herself, Orchid was pretty sure that girl was just as broken as the pile of sharp edges she was put to rest in.





	1. She Observes

**Author's Note:**

> a small one-shot I wrote while feeling terribly emotional that follows a somewhat mentally fractured Fem!Harry as she tries to watch people. 
> 
> it's short, it's not much, but i mean hey lots of cool things come in tiny packages.

There is something wrong with Orchid Potter. Her Aunt and Uncle knows it, her cousin knows it, even she, personally, knows it. Behind seaglass green-yellow eyes, there is something broken, shattered like ceramic and left untidy in a heap, a pile of not anything at all, thank you very much, stares out from inside. Somewhere, in the gaps between all that nothing, all jagged edges and empty stares, is a girl, but if she were to be honest with herself, Orchid was pretty sure that girl was just as broken as the pile of sharp edges she was put to rest in.

After all, nobody quite knows Orchid as well as Orchid knows herself. She’s become something of a master at that, really – introspection, self-awareness too far too gone for someone who sleeps in the boot cupboard beneath the stairs, someone who is only now eleven.

Hagrid doesn’t see it, no sir he does not. Maybe he doesn’t want to see what he’d caused, or at least what he’d been indirectly responsible for enabling. Instead, he smiles, he treats her like she isn’t so much empty debritis, like there’s, somehow, still that little baby girl he remembers cradling and cooing all the way to her prison.

(Orchid remembers too, of course, elsewise she might be able to forget the comfort of things she barely understood.)

So sitting on the train, perched nervous-like and hunched at the edge of her seat, Orchid _watches_. People watch her, she knows, she’s been able to find them since she was young, some consequence of her freakishness, no doubt. She’s known too many things too early, she reckons, enough to fill up a mind unprepared and break it all at once, like taping a firehose to a plastic water bottle and expecting anything good to come out of it when you turn the water on.

Still, _watching_ is a comfort. Orchid has few of those, considering her circumstances, and while people have found it, apparently, _unnerving_ to be stared at, she thinks it fair that they ought to share their ability to look and observe.

_Snhrk_.

The door opens.

“Hullo then,” the ginger boy is interesting to look at, in a queer sort of way. His voice is, decidedly, less interesting. He sounds nervous, and Orchid wonders. “Seems to be no other compartments that aren't full, mind if I sit here?”

Orchid stares.

The ginger boy goes quiet, even though the world around him is a thing of whirling giggles and snickers.

_Snhrk_.

The door closes.

Orchid glances back out the window, yellow-green eyes reflecting back at her.

The train moves on.

This repeats two more times, once with a girl who says a whole lot but with little actual content, and then by a boy who says so very little but with too much content for it to be anything good. Both receive her stare, both are Observed, and both leave.

They don’t share her pastime.

When the train finally stops - Orchid pulling out of her jumper-and-what-have-you, sliding into clothes that fit her for the first time, even if they are somewhat weird - it’s dark, and she’s informed to leave her luggage. Orchid, in all honesty, doesn’t much like that, not that she wants to get up to anything bad, but you see, observing things is terribly important to her, and she doesn’t want to leave behind what seemed to be the only other thing that Observed quite like her. Reaching down, she unclasps her trunk, pulls open the too-big compartment, and unlocks a cage; tugging free a drowsy companion, another break of the rules, but one she’s willing to grit her teeth through.

After all, there’s nothing quite so fascinating to Observe than the sleepy, newborn snake with striking yellow eyes.

Shame that they can’t Talk yet, but such is the cost of buying a random egg out of a basket from an old lady missing one eye, one leg, and all of her teeth. There were other eggs in it, ‘course, but none of them were so drawing-of-the-eye, not like the yellow-and-green freckled thing at the bottom, clustered deep beneath.

With some urging, the snake coils up her sleeve, molding itself against her nape. She’ll let it sleep for now – she can watch it later.

She’s scolded by an older boy, one with fiery ginger hair, a bit like the one she first Observed. He’s less easy to unnerve, and takes her stares with a silent resignation. He mutters something about a moon, but Orchid doesn’t think too deeply about it; the moon is, after all, rather pretty.

The inside of Hogwarts is warm and clustered and loud. Too loud, far too loud. Loud like things shouldn’t be loud, bickering and snickering and casting glances, both at her and at others. The line she’d been put into by a woman with a rather owlish stare dwindles, last names trending from A to B, then to D and E. Soon enough, the Ps.

“Orchid Potter.”

The room goes quiet at that, which Orchid comes to appreciate. Like the ones before her - and no doubt _the ones after_ \- she walks, and walks, and walks. An old man, on in years, quite literally blanches when she locks eyes with him. The twinkle in it - which she’d found, if only by half-glances, so rather interesting - snuffs out a bit like how the ginger boy’s smile did. She sits, the hat is placed, and she _Observes_.

_Well then._ The voice is a lazy drawl, calm, confident, too close to her. Memories tucked against the inside of her thighs and beneath her chin burn at the closeness. There’s a moment of pause, that closeness receding for a breath, pulling away just enough to return her to comfort. When the voice returns, it is distant, like it’s talking from across a small room, not too distant to be impersonal, but not too close that it makes everything stuffy.

_This is rather odd_ , the hat informs, sounding somewhat beside himself. _I’ve Sorted plenty_ —the capitalization is _heard_ in some way that Orchid _does not understand_ , but she wants to, and that apparently draws an appreciative hum from the hat— _but this is rather tricky. Do you even want to be here?_

That’s a good question. Does she? Maybe if there are things to watch, more interesting than the curling spiders above her bed or the individual hairs that grow on bodies.

_That’s... Ravenclaw-ish, I suppose_. There’s something rather put-off about the hat’s tone, but with a sensation a bit like an itch that she could never reach, for it was somehow _mental_ , the hat lets out another _hum_. _Well, now that I’ve gotten through that, what are your opinions on plants, badgers, and stuffy old ladies?_

When Orchid informs him - mentally, she hopes, she’s gotten rather good at this _directional thinking_ thing - that she’s not got much of an opinion on any of those, really, the hat - verbally, this time - blurts a too-loud “ _HUFFLEPUFF!_ ” before quietly apologizing - in her head, this time - that he’d had to, seeing as others had to know where she was going to go.

Orchid gets up, puts the hat back on the stool, and pats the first real conversation partner she’s ever had a few times in gratitude. For some reason, the hat looks to be preening.

Again, the hall gets all too loud, but they quiet down soon enough. The silver-haired boy from the train is observing her, so too is the ginger. The brown haired girl is sorted into something to do with birds and a claw.

Nobody notices her passing bits of chicken into the hem of her sleeve, so that a mulish, toddler-like snake can take idle bites, crooning in that sonorous way that makes some part of her, maybe the part that isn’t quite so broken, keen in a decidedly inhuman way.

Freakish though she may be, she is at least a happy freak.


	2. She Plants

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Orchid settles into her life as a Hufflepuff, has two weeks of dealing with snakes - not the people, the noodles - and their courts, and has an uncomfortable discussion with someone. 
> 
> (I might continue to update this sporadically, but always expect each new chapter to be potentially the last, okay?)

As it turns out, Coiled - the yellow-eyed snake - learned to Speak on her second day at Hogwarts. When Orchid had, in her own opinion, _rightfully wondered_ as to why they chose that name, they’d received a flat, pupiless stare and a “ _because you found me in a coiled basket, you moron_ ” in return.

As it would also turn out, Coiled was blind. Which was a shame, but Orchid was sure she had enough sight for the two of them, really. Apparently it had to do with being moved too early, kept long enough beneath the toad to fully change from ‘a fangless cock’ - (“ _Should you really be telling me this?_ ”) - but not long enough to hatch. Coiled swears it has to be intentional, as the amount of time between being fully changed and hatching is measured in ‘clicks’ - (“ _Surely a speaker understand that?_ ”) - which is probably a denomination of time that’s short, if Coiled's petulant hissing is any indication.

Orchid, personally, is just glad to have someone to talk to who is close to her. There are others - most of who give her wary stares tinged with something she really doesn’t understand - but they all speak a language she _understands_ \- (“ _All snakes understand human speak, we simply don’t care much to answer it. You are the same._ ”) - but not one she can speak. Mind you, Orchid has tried, but the rhasp in her voice was enough to set Uncle Vernon off more than once and neither of the beatings that came from it had been anything close to pleasant, so snake-speak it was.

Sure, there are other snakes to talk to. In fact, there may be _too many_ snakes for someplace so cold, but they all tend to sleep in the pipes that carry steam from the main furnace area, so they seem safe enough. There must be at least more than eight hundred, maybe upwards of a thousand if she ever counts the ones who are better with the cold and tend to keep to the higher floors, where the humid air can’t really reach all too well. Most of them aren’t up for chatting, and don’t have much to say, really, but there’s a few in there that can also spit fire and they tend to be very loud about their opinions towards certain teachers, students, and whether or not it would be ‘proper’ to nest in people's hair.

Pushing her breath out in a huff, Orchid prodded the Gloved Foxhunter in front of her with the fluffy side of her quill, watching as the small buds of ginger fur wiggle in response. Herbology was the last class for the day, and while she had left Coiled to ‘rule’ - she was pretty sure Ashtred and Ashleigh, two very pretty fire-snakes, were just humoring Coiled for the time being - over their ‘court’ - a humid air pipe her bed was pressed up against, almost hidden by the frame - Orchid was still pretty eager to get _back_ to her room and to the snakes.

It was difficult being out and around people, people who looked at her with those weird expressions and whispered between one-another, but never tried to approach. She didn’t like it much, but then again there was very little she had enjoyed recently aside from Herbology, Transfiguration, Charms and Potions if she wasn’t paired with Terry Boot or Sue Li, neither of whom were terribly comfortable around her. Padma Patil was both _very_ pretty and _very_ comfortable around her, especially after they’d bonded - or at least she thought they did - over having ‘skin darker than parchment paper’ and having a ‘fondness for pretty reptiles’, not necessarily in that order.

Padma hadn’t even asked to see the scar, just her snake! Which had drawn giggles from the class, for some reason, but it was still a terribly large improvement. Orchid was getting pretty tired of people wanting to see the warped bit of flesh that curled from her bright, tangled red hair down to her temple on an angle, stopping just short of cutting through her leftmost eye.

“You’ve all done really well, class!” Professor Sprout was also very nice, and her voice reflected it. It was deep, happy, and sweet like chocolate. “Miss Potter, would you please stay behind? I need to speak to you after everyone is gone.”

Orchid gave a reluctant nod. The little tails on her plant wiggled with what she was beginning to think was a happy expression for some reason, but still she wasn’t sure why or if that was true. She dipped her quill and jotted that down among the rest of her scrappy notes, if only to remind herself to check on it later – it was, after all, _really fascinating_.

By the time the rest of the class had left for the long-needed break - it was the last class of the day, to be fair - Professor Sprout had made her rounds, picking up all the potted Gloved Foxhunter aside from her own. Orchid herself had packed her things all up, filing notes away into either the top of her pile - for things she wanted to look up or do when she first got the chance - or in their specific sections - which meant she’d either looked up or did them or now just needed them for reference, whichever came first - and was now more or less waiting for her head of house to approach her. The woman looked terribly hesitant, but after she seemingly took a breath, steeled herself, and stepped forward, Orchid could already feel her stomach beginning to twist.

“How are you settling in?” Professor Sprout paused, at her own question, and then rubbed her eyes. “Sorry, Miss Potter. Would you feel comfortable with responding by writing on a piece of parchment?”

It took a few moments to retrieve her supplies again, and by the time she had Professor Sprout had dragged over a stool and was now sitting and staring expectantly. Hesitating, a bit like her head of house, now that she thought about it, Orchid slowly wrote in reply.

‘It has been okay.’

Professor Sprout’s face lit up a bit at that, but quieted down after a moment. “Someone brought up some concerns to me,” she said rather stiltedly, her tone shifting back into something that Orchid couldn’t identify. “I understand that you’re unable to speak English, but you understand English and can write it, clearly, but even beyond that there’s worries about your home life and how you interact with others.”

Orchid isn’t quite sure what she means, but there’s a restless, unavoidable energy that forces her to begin tapping the tip of her quill against the parchment. Nervousness spills in from someplace unseen, and all of a sudden it’s rather hard to breathe, or at least it’s harder than normal. When, finally, she can pull herself out of the unsnake-like urge to freeze up, Orchid manages to write.

‘Who?’

Professor Sprout hesitates, and this time Orchid _can_ identify the look on her face. It’s the same sort of hesitation Aunt Petunia has when she looks at her in public, when she looks at Vernon yelling at her or brandishing his belt. It’s a torn expression that has a weird amount of depth to it, and had been appearing more and more frequently as she grew older, as if in inverse to how Vernon’s rage had become more pointed, more knife-like, more _clever_.

Finally, she appears to resolve herself of her hesitation - something Aunt Petunia never did - and lets out a breath. “Mr. Diggory, for starters, was worried about you from day three, or about two weeks ago, Ms. Patil has come to me a few times and asked about your speech issues, and if we could find a language that would be easier for you to speak, and Ms. Bones came to me a few days ago worried about what she saw when she walked in on you in the bathroom.”

Unhelpfully, Orchid knew of _two_ of those people and only remembers one of those incidents. Susan Bones was a nice, if stiff, person and she’d seen her while she was coming out of the shower. Was nakedness not something you did in the wizarding world? Then how did they take showers? She wasn’t even sure who ‘Mr. Diggory’ was, though if it was the older boy who stared at her the most then he was probably rather pretty.

‘I don’t understand.’

Professor Sprout frowned, or at least her mouth slightly slanted in that direction. “Your back,” she said quietly, “and thighs, I believe.”

Oh. Those. Orchid screwed her eyebrows together and tried to think of a reason that would be ‘worrying’. Scars were scars, to whatever ends that was, it wasn’t like she had any wounds, open or scabbed over, those had healed almost completely on her fourth day here. She had a knack for healing herself, wounds didn’t tend to last long; she’d always associated it with being rather like a snake herself, and though shedding of their past skin is largely a biological function, it has emphasis - if certain books in the library are to be believed - as a metaphysical representation of healing, evolution, and rebirth. It was just her shedding her skin, though it clearly wasn’t, now that she’d looked up anecdotes on it. Her magic was just protecting her, fixing her, and in a sense that was okay too.

‘They are scars.’

Professor Sprout nodded. “Do you know how you got them?”

‘Yes?’

Why was she so nervous? Why was her handwriting getting worse? Why did her foot begin to tap-tap-tap and her composure begin to slip away from her. Orchid didn’t know, but she didn’t really want to, either. It was all-around unpleasant.

“Can you tell me?” It was almost a plea.

Orchid’s quill paused, hovering. Ink dripped onto the parchment, bleeding through it and onto the tabletop. Her heel tapped a bit harder against the floor, the noise echoing against the greenhouse walls. She could, couldn’t she? Vernon had said not to more than once, so had Petunia and Dudley, but she _wasn’t there_. So why hesitate? Why panic? Why freak out? What would Coiled do? What would Ashleigh and Ashtred do? Aside from setting things on fire?

‘Adults.’ Is all she managed to write out, and there’s a thick, knotted humiliation in her throat at that. Her hands are cramping, her throat is tightening, Orchid forces her gaze away and towards the windows.

“Oh, my dear.” Professor Sprout’s voice is no longer something Orchid likes. It’s too close, too smothering, to thick and nervous and _kind_ and _sad_ and—

Orchid has her things in her hands, her feet on the ground, and Professor Sprout’s voice pleading against her heels seconds later, too late to stop her from escaping from the greenhouse. It’s now the weekend, surely she’s allowed to run away.


End file.
